The Toadcast

Indie Podcast From songbytoad.com, with Added Gin & Swearing

This is Toad Session #39 with Breakfast Muff, recorded on the 9th December 2016 in our warehouse recording space down in Leith - The Happiness Hotel.

These guys have been our pals for a few years, since before the fantastic David Cameron's Eton Mess compilation, and all three of Eilidh, Simone and Cal have been in loads of other bands we love too.

This stuff is short, sharp and ferocious, at the same time as being loose, flippant and funny. Not many bands I know can combine dark humour, angry politics, outright silliness and boisterous riffery like these guys and this session was an absolute ton of fun to do.

As usual, Mario Cruzado made the fantastic videos, with help from Jennifer Baker.

Tim the Mute and Kim Gray came over from Vancouver to tour in late Autumn and early Winter of 2016 and played a show for us at The Happiness Hotel on the 27th November. We managed to make time to squeeze in a wee Toad Session beforehand.

Tim runs the fantastic label Kingfisher Bluez and has become a good friend and musical ally over the years, partly because I love a lot of the music he releases, partly because I like how he goes about his business, and partly because he is just a lovely guy.

He's been over to play shows for us a couple of times now, co-released the first Adam Stafford record we did a few years back, and this year brought his friend Kim Gray with him on tour. They played a fantastic house gig at The Happiness Hotel and we recorded this session beforehand.

As usual, Mario Cruzado made the fantastic videos, with help from Jennifer Baker.

Recorded on the 18th November 2016 before a warehouse show with Kwaing Creosite this gorgeous session shows two things: one, that Ziggy and his Pumpkinseed collaborators are superbly talented and two, that strings sound absolutely fucking gorgeous in The Happiness Hotel.

Recorded and mixed by my good self, with video by Mario Cruzado and photography by Kat Gollock.

This was recorded at the Happiness Hotel back in early Summer 2016 on a gloriously sunny day in Leith.

Storm the Palace were up in Edinburgh to record at Chamber Studio which happens to be just down the road from us so they took the opportunity to pop in and record a Toad Session while they were around. Sophie, as it happens, is a veteran of Toad Sessions past, having been up here with Honeytrap to record a session back in 2009. That was possibly our most drunken and raucous Toad Session of all time, ending in a drunken dance party in the living room.

This time around things were rather more sedate, with polite beers in the garden afterwards, but the session still turned out beautifully. Thanks to photographers Andy Catlin and Steven Crichton, and to Rich Hanrahan for filming and Lily Higham for filming and editing the videos for us.

Mrs. Toad and I, as you possibly know, went on something of an epic road trip at the end of July this year.

We took the ferry to Amsterdam and drove up through Germany to Denmark, through Sweden via the Volvo Museum, and into Norway, where we went all the way up the West Coast via the Trollstigen in the South, up through Molde, Kristiansund, Trondheim, Mo I Rana, through the Lofoten Islands to Tromsø. After a couple of days there we went East and South through Finland, took the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn, then drove through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into Russia where we spent our 10th wedding anniversary in Kaliningrad, on board a decommissioned oceanographic research vessel.

From there it was Poland and the Czech Republic to Vienna, where Mrs. Toad flew home and I carried on to even sillier adventures. But that is the subject for another podcast. For now, here are a bunch of songs from our Norway trip. Because these were all on mixtapes to play in the car whilst driving it's all actually surprisingly upbeat too. Not your usual miserable shite.

Firstly, NO I shall not be launching into a long-winded plea for acceptance over how long it has been since the last podcast. Other shit distracted me, as is always the case when someone doesn't do something. A lot of other shit, in this case.

I don't know if any of you remember this, but in April me and my most singularly epic Volvo Bette (pronounced 'Betty' because she's a stubborn and moody old bitch and therefore named after Bette Davis) went on the Rust2Sahara trip with the Rust2Rome Pioneers group. It was, as I am sure you can imagine, a pretty fucking epic experience.

After a couple of surprise detours, via Belfast for example, and the Pendine Sands in Wales, and some straight ahead burns down the motorways of Spain, we crossed into Morocco and there the really amazing stuff really began. We dodged camels, lost track of where the road was entirely, jumped sand dunes, clambered over the top of the Atlas mountains on a tiny goat track, visited a Bond villain lair in an extinct volcano, lost suspension, oil filters and exhausts and suffered punctures.

We had to ask random mechanics at the side of the road to help us out, welding bits of the cars back together with fags in their mouths and no more than a pair of sunglasses to shield their eyes. We ran out of petrol so badly we ended up having to siphon between cars to get to the next town, and over the CBs we planned and executed a pit stop to swap a battery from one car to another, jump start them and resume our 100mph dash to Tangiers port that an F1 team would have been proud of.

Technically speaking, recording is banned from our living room, but erm, Mrs. Toad was away and Rocky was by himself so why the fuck not, eh?

This was an odd mismatch. Originally the session was prepared for Chantal Acda, who was headlining the tour. Then it turned out she couldn’t make it due to illness, and then there I was having a chat with Rocky, who I’d never exchanged a word with before.

Considering I was monumentally unprepared, this was a wonderful session. Rocky was relaxed and chatty, and it was one of the nicest and easiest conversations we’ve had on the session since they began in 2008.

Well as you probably know, Mrs. Toad and I spent the last quarter of 2015 living in Brooklyn - in Red Hook to be precise - and it was fucking amazing.

Red Hook itself is a fucking brilliant neighbourhood. Still pretty industrial, but with loads of really nice places, so the balance between residents and incoming hipsters (like, I suppose, ourselves - we are the problem!) is still pretty decent for the time being. Only a matter of time, I suppose, but for now it's a pretty great place to be.

Well while I was out there I went to some gigs, listened to some music, and with the help of my little brother's recording expertise and Tom from Gold Flake Paint's curatorial sagacity we made a record. That's right, the fifth Song, by Toad Split 12" (actually the one and only release on Toad Flake Paint Records) was recorded at the National Opera Centre while I was out there.

So this is a mix of bands I saw, bands I listened to and bands I worked with in the three months when we could pretend to be a trendy Brooklyn record label for a bit.

The Lithpcast is named after the rather impressive lisp I have developed since my dentist yanked my front-left incisor out of my mouth the other day and replaced it with empty space and stitches. There will be a new tooth bunged in there at some point, for the time being I have a rather uncomfortable denture which I don't wear, a bad lisp, and a general sense of trepidation about how I am actually supposed to fucking eat.

The tunes this week are somewhat defined by the fact that various things have nudged me out of the way of new music, so there is a lot of Song, by Toad Records stuff, but for some reason also a lot of profoundly obscure other songs too.

I feature three really good compilations put together by other folk, a wee plug for a pal's label, and there's even time for some surprise Chumbawamba. Who could possibly resist.

So Mrs. Toad and I are back from Rust2Romania (just) and before I throw myself into the second half of the Pale Imitation Festival I thought I might take the time to reflect on the rather epic adventure we just experienced.

We have some of the tunes, both excellent and just plain silly (and sometimes both), which we played as we charged about through some of the more unexpected parts of Europe. Driving from Edinburgh to Romania, for example, probably shouldn't include a chapter titled 'via Greece', but somehow it did.

Getting slung in a Romanian jail also 'shouldn't' have happened either, but it was awfy close, and finally Mrs. Toad and I ended up with a wee trip down memory lane by going to a Heuriger in Vienna on the way home. It was all over the place, this particular trip, but especially fantastic because of it.